If You Loved Me Page 9

  “Yes. And I still don’t like it—your trusting gramma waving at us as if we’re off to a Girl Scout weekend instead of me delivering you to an orgy . . .”

  “It’s not an orgy. Stop using that word!”

  “Whatever,” Amber says. “I’ve got to get the car back.”

  I close the door, wave, and take my stuff around back. The extra key is under a pot full of herbs. Tyler won’t be home until after ten but that’s okay. I told him I’d have pizza fixings ready, and I’m determined to spend at least three hours reading Jane Eyre. I figure if I spend three hours each day of the weekend, I’ll be caught up by Monday. That should make Mr. Snyder happy.

  Between having Woodsie annoyed at me for not paying attention, and Snyder threatening to kick me out of class, and getting D’s on my math homework, last week was an academic disaster. Only one month into my senior year and I’m already having to turn over a new leaf.

  Chapter

  10

  After an hour with Jane Eyre, in which things are beginning to look better for her because she finally has a decent job at a place called Thornfield Hall, I close the book and go into the kitchen to check out the supplies.

  There’s tomato paste and a big can of parmesan cheese and a six pack of soda. I grab my coin purse and walk to the market, about six blocks away. The air is clear and fresh and the San Gabriel Mountains look as if you could walk to Mt. Wilson in about half an hour. It’s an amazing day for the Los Angeles basin, where the air is usually heavy and gray and leaves a bad taste in your mouth.

  As I walk into the market I notice a red Honda Civic parked alone, back by a light pole. It seems like I’ve noticed it before. But why would I? I’m sure I don’t know anyone with a little red Civic like that.

  Inside I pick up two ready-made pizza crust things, pepperoni, fresh mushrooms, sliced black olives, and mozzarella cheese. Tyler likes anchovies but, as much as I want to be unselfish, I can’t bring myself to buy them. They’re so slimy.

  As I’m turning the corner to Tyler’s house I get a glimpse of a red Honda zipping past. There’s no reason for me to feel creepy. There must be about a million red Honda Civics running around the San Gabriel Valley. For some reason, though, it gives me an eerie feeling, and I quicken my pace to get to Tyler’s. Once inside, I check to be sure all the doors are locked, then I check the windows. As I’m checking the lock on the corner window in the living room, I see a small red car way down at the end of the block. I don’t know if it’s the one I saw earlier or not. It could be. Or it could all be only my imagination.

  After I put the groceries away I pour a soda into an ice-filled glass and take Jane Eyre back to Tyler’s room. I fluff up his pillows and stretch out on his bed. His room has a pleasant scent—essence of Tyler. I sink into his pillows, happy to be here, and take up where I left off in my reading.

  Jane Eyre is secretly in love with this weird guy, Mr. Roches­ter. It seems as if he loves her, too, but she doesn’t know it. As I read, I realize that Jane Eyre and I have some things in common. For one thing, she has no mother or father. And her childhood was awful, living with an aunt and cousins who were so mean to her it’s a wonder she lived through it. She didn’t have anyone in her life like Grams, either, so she never found a safe place, like I did.

  Besides being an orphan, and then later being in love, Jane Eyre also expressed herself creatively. She did it with painting, and I do it with writing.

  It’s easier to pay attention to the book now that I realize that Jane Eyre and I are kind of alike. I’d still rather be reading Angela’s Ashes, but this isn’t as bad as it seemed at first.

  I’m still reading when I hear Tyler’s car turn the corner. It’s funny, isn’t it, how you can always tell the sound of the car that the person you love drives?

  I jump up from the bed and smooth the spread, run brush my teeth, and am waiting on the back porch by the time Tyler parks his car at the end of the driveway.

  “Hey, Curly,” he says, bouncing up the steps and giving me a big bear hug.

  “Hey, Green Jeans,” I say, nuzzling my face in his chest.

  “I got stuff for pizza,” 1 tell him, leading him into the kitchen.

  “Are you cleared with your gramma for the weekend?”

  “She thinks I’m at Amber’s.”

  “Cool,” he says, giving me that meltdown smile of his.

  I open the refrigerator and take out the pepperoni and mozza­rella cheese, then turn the knob on the oven to start it preheating. Tyler reaches past me and turns the knob to the off position.

  I turn it back on.

  “The oven’s got to preheat,” I tell him.

  “I’m preheated,” he says, turning the knob back off. He pulls me close to him and kisses me long and hard.

  “I’ve been thinking of this all afternoon,” he says. “Waiting on customers, watering plants, carrying orders to the truck, all afternoon, every step I’ve been thinking ‘Lauren’s at my house, waiting for me. Lauren’s there.’”

  “Don’t you want pizza?” I ask.

  “There’s something else I want more,” he says, then kisses me again. His lips are soft and warm. Our tongues tease at each other’s lips and I lean into him, feeling the warmth of his body under the roughness of his overalls. He holds me closer, kisses me harder, then takes my hand and leads me to his bedroom.

  I get a kind of scared feeling. Ever since our phone call, when we sort of argued about sex, neither of us has brought up the subject. I hope Tyler doesn’t think I’m ready to do it all just because I’m spending the weekend with him.

  Tyler’s bedroom is nearly dark, except for the subdued glow of the Mickey Mouse night-light that is always on in the adjoin­ing bathroom. He lies down, crossways, on his bed and gently pulls me down beside him.

  “We should talk,” I tell him.

  “Ummmm, later,” he whispers, turning to face me.

  He unbuttons my blouse, kissing each newly exposed space as he does so.

  “Tyler, I. . .”

  He unbuttons the waist of his overalls and guides my hand inside, to his “friend,” as he calls it. Feeling how excited he is gets me even more excited. But we’ve got to talk. I know we’ve got to talk.

  “Really, Ty . . . ”

  “Really, yourself,” he whispers, undoing my bra and gently caressing my breasts. “You are so amazingly beautiful.”

  “I don’t want to do it,” I say.

  “Do what? . . . This?” he asks, kissing me lightly on the sensitive part of my neck.

  “No. You know,” I tell him, breathing fast now. “IT! I don’t want to do IT.”

  He slips his hand inside my pants and finds his way to the wetness between my legs.

  “Your body says you want to do it,” he whispers.

  “But I don’t,” I say.

  “Let’s just see what happens,” he says, moving his hand slowly around my most sensitive parts. “Let’s just take all our clothes off . . . We won’t do anything you don’t want to do, but let’s get close. We’ve never had all our clothes off together.”

  All of the time he is telling me this he is moving, his hands on me, mouth grazing my skin for punctuation, hips thrusting his friend against my hand, and I’m sinking into the feeling, the sensation, the thrill of Tyler.

  He slips my blouse and bra off and I unbutton my jeans. He pulls off his overalls and shirt and tosses them on the floor. He pulls my jeans off and starts to take my underpants off.

  “No,” I tell him.

  He takes his own underwear off then and is totally nude. He rolls over on top of me. We are both breathing strong and heavy, in unison. He tries again to slip my underpants off.

  “No,” I whisper.

  “Please. Please,” he says. “I promise I’ll stay outside.”

  “No,” I tell him, feeling him strong against me, only the light fabric of my panties between us. I want so much to be as close as I can get, to feel him inside me, I know it would happen if I didn�
�t hold back with that one light barrier.

  We kiss, strong. I give him the little bitey kisses he likes around his ears and neck. He moves his hands lower, against my butt, and holds me close to him. He thrusts, easy and slow, rubbing with his “friend” against my secret places, then thrusts harder, faster, until he groans in what sounds like pain but I now know is pleasure. Seconds later, I, too, cry out with pleasure. Our breathing slows, and we lie quiet in the near darkness of the room.

  “I love you so much, Lauren,” he tells me. “You’re all I’ve ever wanted and I didn’t even know it until that day at the nursery.”

  “I got so scared when I thought you were mad at me. I don’t know how I’d go on if you ever stopped loving me,” I whisper.

  “I won’t. I won’t ever stop. I just want the whole thing. I’m almost eighteen and I’m still a virgin and I want the whole thing.”

  “But, aren’t you happy right now?”

  “Yes,” he says. “But I could be happier. I could make you happier.”

  “I couldn’t be happier than right now,” I tell him, snuggling even closer.

  We doze for a while, then, about midnight, I wake to the sound of the shower in Tyler’s bathroom. I turn over and close my eyes, half-remembering a dream of a man and a child, running.

  “Awake?”

  Tyler is standing over me, a giant bath towel wrapped around him.

  “Almost,” I say, still trying to see the dream.

  “Pizza-time,” he says, grinning.

  “Now?” I mumble.

  “Wakie-wakie,” he says, laughing.

  He leaves the room and I hear him shuffling around in the kitchen. I take a quick shower and put on my sweatpants and sweater, then join him. He hands me a soda and I open the tomato paste and spread it over the pizza shell, while he slices the mozzarella into paper-thin pieces.

  When the pizza is cooked we put everything on a tray and take it into the family room where they have a TV with a giant screen. We watch “Psycho” while we munch out. At first it’s kind of fun, but then that Norman Bates guy is such a creep that I lose my appetite. And then, when the woman’s stabbed in the shower—that’s got to be one of the scariest things I’ve ever seen in a movie.

  While the movie’s rewinding we sit snuggled up, talking about school and Harper’s class.

  “I’ll be right back,” Tyler says, jumping up as if he’s just remembered something.

  When he comes back he’s dressed in his mother’s robe, with a blanket wrapped around him, pretending to be Norman Bates.

  “Not funny,” I say, even though I’m laughing.

  “Let me show you to your room,” he says.

  “Stop!” I say, laughing harder, trying to pull the blanket off him.

  A sudden sound at the window makes us both freeze in silence.

  “What was that?” I whisper, the tingle of adrenaline reaching my fingertips.

  Tyler puts a finger to his lips to silence me, then tiptoes to the window and pulls the drape back just a crack. He stands there for a long time, then pulls the drape back farther for a broader view. I walk over to stand beside him.

  “Nothing he says—a branch and our Psycho-crazed imagi­nations.”

  “Look at that,” I whisper, pointing toward the street.

  A small car, parked at the end of the block, starts up and drives past the house and around the corner, all with its lights off.

  “What about it?” Tyler says.

  “Why would they try to sneak by with their lights off?”

  “Sneak by?” Tyler grins. “They just forgot to turn them on, that’s all.”

  “No, there’s this car that I keep seeing. Sometimes I think someone is following me, and watching me.”

  “‘Psycho’ has got you spooked.”

  “Maybe,” I say. But in my heart I know it was that Honda. And I know my spooky feeling is from something more real than a movie.

  Chapter

  11

  Because I’ve got a game at eight in the morning, and Tyler has to be at work by eight-thirty, we get up earlier than we want to. When I come out to the kitchen, Tyler is pouring us each an orange juice.

  “I’ve got to check my kids before we go,” Tyler says, referring to all the stuff he’s planted the past few weeks.

  I follow him outside and stand watching from the back porch. Tyler looks at each of the new plants and grasses and checks the soil for moisture. He pinches dead flowers off the roses and twines loose morning glory stems around their trellis.

  Usually I’m rushing around so much in the mornings I forget to look at things. Standing here, drinking my orange juice, I am caught by the freshness and beauty of the morning. A humming­bird flits around the purple sage out in Tyler’s experimental garden. It all feels peaceful and safe.

  Tyler comes back to the porch and sits beside me.

  “I’ve got to talk my mom into letting me dig up the rest of this lawn,” he says. “I’ll put in more drought-resistant grasses. It’s stupid to waste water on a lawn.”

  “You could probably come dig up Grams’ lawn. She was talking about more native plant stuff just the other day. And she’s starting a really stinky compost pile.”

  “You’ve got the coolest gramma in the world. My nana doesn’t know compost from condom . . .Which reminds me . . .”

  “No you don’t,” I laugh. “No more on the subject.”

  “Yes, more,” he says, grabbing me and kissing me, face, chin, neck, hands, kissing, kissing, kissing, saying “More, more, more.”

  I j ump off the porch and run around front, Tyler chasing close behind, laughing.

  At the corner of the house I slide to an abrupt stop. Tyler bumps into me, nearly knocking me over.

  “There!” I say, pointing down the street, seeing the back end of a red Honda turning onto Cyprus Street.

  “What?” Tyler asks.

  “The car. The same one that was out there last night . . . It feels ominous,” I tell him.

  Tyler frowns, thoughtful. “But it could all be coincidence, or imagination,” he says.

  “It could be,” I agree. “It feels like something more, though.”

  We go back inside to get ready for the day, our lighthearted mood now subdued.

  “Maybe you shouldn’t come back here after your game.”

  “I planned to read here in the afternoon, like yesterday,” I tell him.

  “Yeah, but in case there is someone watching you, I’m sure there’s not, but just to be on the safe side, you shouldn’t be here alone.”

  “I’m not afraid,” I tell him, which is not exactly true.

  “Go read in the library. I’ll pick you up there after work.”

  “I can’t read in the library. Grams may be substituting for her sick friend.”

  “And . . . ?”

  “And . . . she thinks I’m at Amber’s house, working on our peer communications project.”

  “Well, I don’t want you to be here by yourself. Just the other day I saw on the news how some girl was killed by this whacked-out guy. It happens, you know.”

  I lean into his chest, thinking how lucky I am that Tyler cares enough to worry about me.

  “I feel bad enough about lying to Grams as it is. I sure don’t want to run into her in the library and have to make up some other story.”

  “Well, go read at the mall then. They’ve got all those tables there. I’ll pick you up at the mall, down by the fountain.”

  “I hate the mall. Who can concentrate at the mall?”

  “Kelsey,” he says with a laugh. “You’re the same sign, why don’t you like the mall?”

  He prances around in imitation of Kelsey’s hip-swinging sexy walk, getting me laughing so hard I have to run to the bathroom. When I come out Tyler has changed into his work clothes and is leaning up against the kitchen counter, eating a banana.

  “Want one?”

  “No, thanks.”

  While he eats, he watches me.

&
nbsp; After a minute or so he says, “I know by the way you’re pulling at your hair that you’re thinking about something. What is it?”

  I stop running my fingers through my hair, not even aware I’d been doing that.

  “I’m thinking I’ll come back here after my game, and read like I need to do. I’m thinking I’m imagining stuff.”

  “Yeah. Tonight we’ll watch a Disney video.”

  Tyler pulls me to him and starts giving me short kisses that soon turn into longer ones. Then he stands back.

  “We can’t be doing this! I’ve got to get to work. You’ve got a game. What’s wrong with us?” he says in a fake panic voice, again making me laugh.

  I rush into the bedroom and put on my volleyball uniform. I grab my backpack, with a change of clothes in it. We double check each lock and, instead of putting the extra key back under the herb pot, I put it in my backpack. If anyone is watching, I don’t want to make the extra key available.

  When Tyler drops me off at school he says, “Promise you’ll be careful.”

  “I promise. I’ll see you this afternoon.”

  I give him a quick kiss and sprint over to the gym. Amber is already there, doing her stretches.

  “So?” she says.

  “So what?”

  “So did you do it or not?”

  “Do what?” I say.

  “You know what I mean! Don’t act stupid.”

  “It’s not an act,” I tell her.

  “Just answer my question.”

  “If you mean did I lose my virginity, the answer is no.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  I latch onto a place at the wall, beside Amber, and start stretching my calves.

  “What changed your mind?” Amber asks.

  “Nothing. My mind just stayed made up . . . I kept thinking about Baby Hope and Sarah Mabry. How one day Sarah was Homecoming Queen and the next she was almost a murderer. She would have been, too, if Grams and I hadn’t found the baby.”

  “But you wouldn’t have to get pregnant,” Amber says.

  “So now are you going to try to talk me into it?”

  “No. I’m just saying . . .”

  “I know. I’ve thought about all that stuff, too. Birth control stuff, and stuff that makes getting some STD almost impossible. But it’s all just almost. Almost certain not to get pregnant. Almost certain not to get a disease.”